Hothouse Earth: the tipping point has owners, not abstract culprits

According to Reporterre, the scenario of an uninhabitable Earth could be closer than expected. Researchers have long warned about climate tipping points. Crossing them could trigger biogeophysical processes, such as the irreversible collapse of ice sheets or the transformation of the Amazon into savannah. These mechanisms would lead us towards a "Hothouse Earth", with global warming above 5 °C. The text available cuts off before specifying the threshold at which everything could tip. We will not invent it: the full study will have to be read.

What we know is nonetheless enough to frame the problem. What follows is our reading, not a finding of the researchers.

A tipping point is, put simply, a feedback loop that escapes all control. The forest that burns or dries out releases its carbon, which heats the air, which dries the forest further. Melting ice exposes dark water, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice. The physics is universal. The engine, however, has an address.

Marx spoke of a "metabolic rift": a break in the exchange between society and nature, dug by an industry and an agriculture that exhaust the soil as much as the workers. Today's Marxists apply it to the climate. Accumulation demands an ever-growing flow of energy and materials. The costs, meanwhile, are offloaded onto ecosystems and onto the populations who have emitted the least. An Amazon turning into savannah is that rift at the scale of a continent.

We will be told that "we are all responsible". A comfortable phrase, especially for those whose profits depend on coal, oil and gas. Emissions have owners, shareholders and boards of directors. They also have subsidies, which keep flowing while households are advised to turn down the heating and sort their packaging. Zero individual guilt: recycling has never melted a single shareholder.

And risk is not distributed like the bill. If the thresholds are crossed, the first to be hit will be those already living on coastlines, in dry zones, in homes that cannot be air-conditioned. They will then be told about "adaptation", a polite word for shifting costs onto the poorest. Carbon markets, for their part, promise to solve the question by putting a price on it, that is, by leaving it to those who profit from it.

The exact timing of the tipping points remains to be established, and researchers are best placed to say so. But a scientific warning calls for a political response: public planning of the phase-out of fossil fuels, decided democratically, rather than blind trust in a system whose very logic is never to stop. If Hothouse Earth is a point of no return, the moment to decide who holds the wheel is also approaching.